The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 19.0195 Tuesday, 1 April 2008
From: Hardy M. Cook <
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Date: Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Subject: Recent Digital Collections of Shakespeare's Quartos (and
Folios) Online
Dear SHAKSPEReans,
According to a Reuters report a few weeks ago and to a brief piece in an
email distributed by the Folger Library that I received, the British
Library and the Folger Library are working together to make available
online a free digital collection of quarto (and folio?) editions of
Shakespeare's plays from their collections. The cost for scanning and
uploading is being funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities
and the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee and is "expected to
take up to a year." After completion, visitors will be able compare
quartos from both collections side-by-side. This project joins and
extends the capabilities of several already existing projects.
For example, the British Library's web site provides access to many of
its "treasures" in high quality digital images:
<http://www.bl.uk/treasures/treasuresinfull.html>. Currently, visitors
can preview sample pages from the BL's manuscript of Mallory's _Le Morte
Darthur_ and will soon be able to examine the entire Winchester
manuscript online. The first and the second edition of Caxton's
_Canterbury Tales_, two copies of the Gutenberg Bible, a copy of the
_Magna Carta_, and 253 digitized Renaissance festival books from the
British Library's collection are also now available. Of greatest
interest to Shakespeareans, however, are the 93 copies of 21 quartos of
Shakespeare's plays that can be examined side-by-side in high quality
digital images on the Internet:
<http://molcat1.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/search.asp>.
To illustrate the scholarly usefulness of having Internet accessibility
to these early printings of Shakespeare, let me relate a story. A few
years back, while I was working on my note, "Unnoticed Variant Reading
in Q1 _Lucrece_, 1594," Eric Rasmussen asked me, if I would check some
variants in the Folger Library's seven copies of _Two Noble Kinsmen_ for
the edition that he and G. R. Proudfoot were preparing for the Malone
Society. I agreed since I live in the Washington, D.C., area and was
then spending a lot of time at the Folger Library. I was rewarded with
an acknowledgement in a note at the bottom of page viii. However, if the
BL/Folger Library project had been operational, I probably would not
have been asked (unless there were an issue with bleed through or a
similar problem that would require examination of the actual page with a
high powered magnifier). Eric Rasmussen (or one of his graduate
students) could have checked the variant readings online without the
need to have a researcher physically present at the Folger Library.
Those of us who work with so-called "rare" materials know of the
time-consuming nature of the procedures to get an original quarto on
one's desk. After getting permission to use the research library and
usually a second permission to certify one's familiarity and competence
with handling "rare books and manuscripts," the researcher then has to
locate the information in a card catalogue (one that uses printed cards
containing the information describing the contents of the institution's
collection or that is an electronic catalogue - such as Hamnet at the
Folger Library, <http://shakespeare.folger.edu/>). The researcher next
fills out a form requesting the material. Sometimes, yet another
librarian must grant yet another permission to use the material before
the request is placed and someone goes to retrieve the material from a
vault (in the Folger Library that vault is several stories underground)
or another secure storage facility. At the British Library, it is
advisable to place orders for "rare" materials days ahead of time, since
BL "rare" books are normally stored at facilities miles away. In any
case and in the best of circumstances, the time for getting a
Shakespearean quarto for examination may take hours from the time one
requests to the time one receives the "rare book." Having access to the
same material over the Internet has obvious advantages. In fact, now
that so many "rare" materials are digitalized, many research libraries
no long permit, except in the most unusual of circumstances, a
researcher to handle Shakespearean quartos and folios.
At the forefront of digitalizing rare books and manuscripts is the
Octavo company. Among it titles, Octavo sells electronic editions of
Shakespeare's _Sonnets_ (British Library), _The First Folio_ (Folger
Shakespeare Library), and the 1640 Benson edition of _The Poems_
(Warnock Library). But these three editions are only the start. I
learned a few months ago from Terry Gray ("Mr. William Shakespeare and
the Internet") about "The Rare Book Room" -
<http://www.rarebookroom.org/>. The home page to this site reads as
follows: "The 'Rare Book Room' site has been constructed as an
educational site intended to allow the visitor to examine and read some
of the great books of the world. / Over the last ten years, a company
called "Octavo" embarked on digitally photographing some of the world's
great books from some of the greatest libraries. These books were
photographed at very high resolution (in some cases at over 200
megabytes per page). / This site contains all of the books (about 400)
that have been digitized to date. These range over a wide variety of
topics and rarity. The books are presented so that the viewer can
examine all the pages in medium to medium-high resolution."
The site includes books by Galileo, Newton, Copernicus, Kepler,
Einstein, Darwin, and others. But for our purposes, "The Rare Book Room"
collection's Shakespeare section is stunning: it "contains most of the
Shakespeare Quartos from the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the
University of Edinburgh Library, and the National Library of Scotland.
It also contains a First Folio from the Folger Shakespeare Library as
well as the Folger Library's unique copy of Q1 _Titus Andronicus_, its
copy of Edmund Spenser's _The Shepheardes Calender_ (1579), and the
Lambarde manuscript of _The Womans Prize_ (Subtitled _the Tamer Tamed_,
John Fletcher's Jacobean answer to _The Taming of the Shrew_ in which
Petruchio, the tamer, is tamed). As far as the quartos of the plays go,
"The Rare Book Room" collection with the addition of the Folger
Library's quartos, with which I began this piece, will be about as much
as the textual scholar or teacher could ask for. Terry Gray in a private
correspondence to me wrote, "It seems to me the availability of these
materials should provoke a revolution in textual studies now that a much
wider community of students have access to the primary documents."
However, as one who has been working with Shakespeare's poems, I confess
to being disappointed. I assume that the Folger Library will be added to
the existing collection, so let me be clear that my remarks are
addressed to the selections that are NOW available. The Bodleian Library
holds the unique copy of Q1 _Venus and Adonis_ (1593); however, the only
copy of the narrative poem to be found in "The Rare Book Room" is a 1596
(O2). _Lucrece_ (Q1, 1594) is another story. There are eleven extant
copies of Q1: two are in private hands; of the remaining 9 copies, 3
copies are at the Folger Library (one is imperfect) and 2 are at the
British Library and 2 are at the Bodleian. Unfortunately, only Q1 Malone
34 is available in "The Rare Book Room." There are two quarto versions
of the _Sonnets_ in this collection: one from the Bodleian (Malone 34)
and one from the British Library (Greville 11181). Rollins reported the
existence of 13 extant versions although one was in private hands (4
Aspley imprints, 7 Wright, 2 without title pages). I would have like to
seen, at least, one Wright imprint of those available: Bodleian (Malone
886) or BL (C.21.c.44). I hope that when the Folger quartos are
accessible that a Wright imprint will be added.
Among all these riches, I have yet one more site of interest to textual
scholars. It is a work in progress but nevertheless a work that deserves
to be mentioned and known: Terry Gray's "Shakespeare's Editors" from his
"Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet":
<http://shakespeare.palomar.edu/Editors/>. Gray explains to me that he
had hoped to put together brief and useful pages but that the project
took on a life of its own. On these pages, Gray provides succinct
discussions of the editors of Shakespeare's texts from Heminges and
Condell and the seventeenth century adaptations, to the great eighteen
century editors (Rowe, Pope, Theobald, Hanmer, Warburton, Johnson,
Capell, Steevens, Reed, and Malone), through the nineteenth century
(with the Cambridge/Globe Shakespeare) up to Sidney Lee and beyond. In
addition to the discussions of the editors and their editions, Terry,
using Google Books, began including links to facsimiles of the various
editions, that way madness lay. The result is another wonderful
contribution to textual resources available on the Internet. Once again,
the Shakespeare's Editors project is a work in progress. This year Terry
has been concentrating on the blog component of his "Mr. William
Shakespeare and the Internet" site: <http://mrshakespeare.typepad.com>.
If readers of SHAKSPER were not aware of "Mr. William Shakespeare and
the Internet: the blog," I encourage you to examine it and subscribe as
I have. April 18th will be the first anniversary of this valuable blog
and join me in congratulating Terry on yet another significant
achievement in Shakespeare studies. Returning for a moment to
"Shakespeare's Editors," Terry has relied heavily upon Google Books to
find facsimile editions. He has had problems locating a number of
multivolume editions and welcomes emails from anyone who comes across a
link that he had not found as of yet. Finally, Terry wanted me to note
that the Works page will soon be split out by play (and work, for the
non-dramatic poetry), with an overview, sources, date, synopsis,
available editions, criticism, and so on as his time permits.
My apologies for the length of this post, but I have an abiding interest
in matters textual and am excited about the newly available resources.
Best wishes,
Hardy
_______________________________________________________________
S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List
Hardy M. Cook,
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